Blog Post

How Dropbox streams your videos almost instantly

This is a pretty fascinating read for all you multimedia geeks out there: Dropbox detailed its approach towards video streaming in a blog post this week that dives deep into the technical details of codecs and transcoding pipelines. In short, Dropbox takes the first few seconds of each and every video its users upload and preps them for streaming onto a variety of devices. When a user starts to stream a video, it serves up those transcoded bits, and immediately starts to transcode the rest on the fly. Also interesting: A comment by Drobox engineer Pierpaolo Baccichet hints at plans to bring Dropbox video streaming to TV devices.